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The Newest Face of Team Building

Few people would deny that part of running a successful business is ensuring that everyone involved can work together effectively as a team. Unfortunately, not everyone comes to their job with a mind toward working well with others. In fact, studies show that a staggering 31% of employees at well-known companies admit that they are not “group oriented workers”. This shocking discovery has led to the trend of developing new and unique methods of building comradery between coworkers – games.

While in the past employees were expected to commiserate on their own time, the threat of falling productivity brought business experts together in order to find a solution to increase company enthusiasm. They found that the best way to generate a sense of companionship was to provide entertaining projects that employees could engage in together, and became part of the corporate functioning in the main office setting as well as in corporate conferences and meetings. The corporate retreat became a core vehicle for the team building activities used to grow productivity. Conference event venues were rented for these types of gatherings, whether conference or retreat, each typically has the space and amenities for activities such as scavenger hunts and trivia competitions, among others that require several people to complete or collaborate. On the surface these may have seemed like pleasant distractions, but behind the fun each employee was learning how to function as part of a team.

While working together to reach their goal, employees found that they could talk to one another to learn about each member’s skill set. This allowed for the most judicious of employees to delegate duties to those who could best accomplish them without wasting time or energy. Interestingly enough, the group tended to defer to these adjudicators, showing that it was possible for the unit to regulate and police itself when a common goal was set before them. With each individual acting on the portion they felt most comfortable completing, game inventors found that teams could finish tasks in a fraction of the expected time. The big question, however, is whether the lessons they learned while playing could effectively be transposed into the workplace.

As many can probably guess, the forerunners of these “Team Building Activities” were able to put the group skills they learned to use in their home office. Instead of feeling like one man armies, workers found that they could rely on individuals to assist in their complex tasks, even if it required requesting help from another department. The desire to work as a group even became more popular, as the employees readily recognized how rapidly and efficiently obligations were finished when they could depend on others to fill in their own shortcomings. The impressive level of improvement that was shown is the primary reason why game-based learning has become a large portion of the business world today and will most likely remain so for a good while.